The Up-and-Running Guide to Architectural Fitness Functions

What you need to know about them without any mysteries left to uncover.

Solving the question: How long is a piece of string? Or many? Photo by Patrycja Chociej on Unsplash

You’ve heard about architectural fitness functions, but most of the material you find lacks concrete details. Let’s fix that.

I’ll explain:

• What architectural fitness functions are
• What they help you do
• How they relate to other test types and architecture practices
• How to build them and use them
• Where to find relevant tooling for fitness functions
• Numerous examples of fitness functions
• How the open-source tool ArchFit can help you get up to speed very quickly with a set of ready-to-use fitness functions

This will hopefully provide a practical runway for you, so I’ll stick in a bunch of additional reading and viewing for you, too, so you have something to do once you want to level up.

Let’s start with the problem before we get to the concept itself.

The problem is we are not used to testing architecture — just code